Love gnolls, and they havea big part in my online campaign, which I have a SH for on the Story Hour boards
Basically, IMC gnolls are Chaotic Neutral rather than Chaotic Evil, and effectively replace elves in being the central nature-related race, with elves being fewer and generally more isolated. The archdruid of the southern Drakkath forests is a gnoll, most of his retinue gnolls along with humans and elves, and the druids of the Drakkath wilds depend on the alleigance of the southern gnoll tribes for their military power. The gnoll tribes are tightly knit packs of family-kin, very much Native American in their appearance with lots of feathers and charms. They are often in disputes with nations encroaching on their territories, and recently the dark Carthagian kingdom has started releasing a new type of vile abominations called fleshtearers onto gnoll villages on the border to test out the monstrosities combat effectiveness.
They are very much into worshipping the spirit world as well as nature, with many beliefs about ancestor spirits and suchlike; psions are common in the society, but are called shamans and it is believed their powers come from their spirit ancestors, which are inextricably bound up into a life-weave that co-exists with all existance.
Here's two extracts from my story hour involving gnolls. The first is when Sandslipper, an earth genasi psion nomad, encounters a gnoll psion-shaman on her travels.
As she sets up camp one evening, on the first night she's in the valley proper, a tattooed gnoll silently approaches, suddenly walking out of the shadows across the other side of her campfire. Since he doesn't seem immediately hostile, and she doesn't know what a gnoll is nor has ever seen one, she greets him and offers him to sit and warm himself by the fire.
The gnoll crouches down, and begins to speak in a bizarre, mystical way, in fluent and melodic common. Here's its actual words from the post:
"A strange web-weave-thread is here," it began in a singsong tone.
"The web dips round you, an alien weight in the weave-plan, drawing others in and down. Shadows dance along the path but do not take notice; why? Shimmering eyes of light that see you as a tool do not see you as more, yet round the threads they weave so skilfully you bring new spider-walking ways. Far travel elicits close retaliation of kind, perhaps, if thread-weaving shadow-spiders merge with the dark."
"Intriguing patterns you weave, yet do not realise? Shaman-sight grants weave-walking, yet here the web is fractured, failing..."
Sandslipper listens to the gnoll shamans words carefully, interpreting that the 'shimmering eyes of light' he mentions must mean Fireball; but she's unable to work out any more than this from the mystic's words. She shows him the package Fireball gave her, to see what he would make of it; immediately the gnolls psionic tattooes start actually moving, the eagles flapping their wings and the bolts of lightning arcing around as he gets quite fraught, telling her to put it away because
"Shadow-weavers walk the threads of the life-web, searching, watching..."
Then he narrows his eyes, and tells her to listen. There, on the breeze, an insane, faint whispering can be heard getting closer. From what she can make out of it, Sandslipper realises something is searching for her - with intention to kill her and take the package. It gets louder and louder and then the shadows nearby coalesce into a large, ebony black arachnid with a row of glittering red eyes and two alarmingly human-like arms underneath its head. The gnoll barks at Sandslipper to leave as he draws a greatsword and begins to manifest psionic powers; she bursts away as the spider tries to get round the gnoll, but the shaman blocks it. Taking a swipe with his blade he misses, hitting a tree instead - and to Sandslippers surprise smashes the trunk into splinters, felling it.
Wasting no more time, Sandslipper runs as fast and as far as she can, manifesting skate to put as much distance as she can between them. She runs until finally fatigue takes her, and she can do nothing else but fall asleep on the road.
More of the arachnids appear round the shaman, demanding to know where Sandslipper went, but he resists their mental commands even though he knows he is running out of energy. The swarm closes in on him...
The following morning, Sandslipper woke most uncomfortably, picking herself up on the road. At least it was light now, and the shadows no longer seemed as menacing as they had when she had been racing through the darkness the previous night...
And the secodn extract is with Melisande, a Carthagian aasimar sorceress> Her country has been attacking the gnolls along the broder but she's quite naive and really doesn't know much about this...
She wandered along a path through the forest. It was drizzling, the onset of spring bringing such weather, and the forest was still largely rather barren and leafless, but Mel and her love of living things was happy to see things such as foxes skittering away occasionally, reassuring her of the cycle of nature here. Then she heard cries of alarm up ahead.
She stepped out of the clearing to see some two-dozen Carthagian men clad in chainmail clustered in the middle, shields up in a protective wall. At her appearance one of the men gawped at her, amazed at her blue skin.
She was used to surprised reactions but this was a bit much - then she suddenly realised that a score of soldiers clustered togather was unlikely to be purely due to her skin colour. This was reinforced when an arrow from outside the ring of trees tore the mans throat out. It was accompanied by shrill whistling like that of birds, that sounded like it was being used as communication.
Mel suddenly felt fear as the men began to shout more orders and brought their shields back up again, the odd-looking woman forgotten in the face of the unseen enemy. She rushed up and wormed her way inside the shield wall, trying to find out what the hell they were up against, but in their panic, firing crossbows at the slightest movement amongst the trees, they just ignored her. After an entangle spell had caught some of the men and odd coloured lights amidst the trees had cries of 'shamen' rising up, gnolls swarmed out from the trees as the Carthagians fell into absolute panic.
Mel had only ever seen bits of gnolls in the bio-labs - to see a real one was impressive. Think of Native American style decorations - the gnolls festooned themselves with little bead charms and feathers, as well as being covered with extensive tattooes and warpaint depicting patterns and totem images. One particularly decorated individual must have been the druid, while two more gnolls loped out of the trees with hands twisted into claws and muzzles full of fiercely sharp teeth - shamen
(egoist psions in fact).
Seeing that some elementary nature magic and some bright lights had spooked the humans, Mel invoked her natural ability to create light to light up the point of her spear and hold it up, trying to rally the men.
This failed miserably when instead it distracted one man enough for a gnoll archer to bring him down with an arrow.
Battle erupted, the shamen and gnoll warriors scything through the humans; but the Carthagians weren't green novices and were putting up a fight. A dual-wielding gnoll ranger struck Mel and sent her toppling over into the mid as he eviscerated another Carthagian, and as she squirmed in pain and tried to avoid getting stepped on, the druid called lightning to incinerate one of the men. That was pretty much it for the Carthagian morale, and they began to get slaughtered.
Once the battle was over, the gnolls proceeded to move amidst the carnage, finishing off the injured. The ranger moved over to Mel, preparing to finish her off; rather than the bloodlust she expected to see in its eyes, instead she saw only sadness and maybe even fear, and it sighed unhappily, weaving the sign of Immar with one hand, as it prepared to finish her off.
It was halted by the druid. As the gnolls vanished back into the forest again, leaving only the carnage, the druid spoke to her in poor, snarled common, pointing deeper into the forest in the direction of a path.
"Look at truth, there."
Then it too left her, all alone, severely injured and lying in the mud. Using her spear as a walking stick, she slowly hobbled off, determined to see the 'truth' the druid spoke of before she died.
She found the truth, as after a long time she came across a druid grove - a ring of stones, next to a small brook. The plant life around it was abundant and green, despite the time of year.
It would have all been a beautiful sight apart from two things.
One was the line of gnoll graves, each marked with the sign of Immar.
The other was the crucified fleshtearer; the beast was pinned up with large wooden splinters. It looked, from the blood on its talons and spilled over its furred chest under its muzzled face, as if it had been in battle, with most of the blood on it probably being that of enemies before they finally managed to bring it down.
She settled down in the peace of the grove, crying because she felt awfully alone, hurt and wanted the protection of her mother, before washing herself in the brook. She considered all that she had seen and came to the conclusion that what must have happened is that the fleshtearer had killed many gnolls, but in the end they'd brought it down. She had no idea why it had been released out here, and assumed the Carthagian warriors had been attacked as retaliation, although since Carthagian soldiers usually wore heavy metal armour made from the ore of the mountain mines, the lightly armoured humans must have been militia or scouts.
She'd only ever seen a fleshtearer once or twice, been allowed a quick view into a containment chamber where one was crouched in the corner devouring a meal. She knew some of the basis of the theory, had seen 'tearer parts being grown in thaum-tanks and put together with Manipulation magic and science, but the final ritual of creation was done with priests of Toran.
(Unlike other Carthagians, who almost all worship the dark god Toran, Mel is disillusioned by what she has seen in the Manipulator laboratories, and has rejected his faith).
